Under Pressure, Soccer Goalies Tend To Dive Right

Team USA goalkeeper Hope Solo fails to save Japanese defender Saki Kumagai's goal during the FIFA Women's Football World Cup final match on July 17 in Germany. Japan won 3-1 in a penalty shootout after the final finished 2-2 in extra time.

John MacDougall
/ AFP/Getty Images

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Originally published on August 3, 2011 12:19 am

The Japanese women's soccer team stunned the United States a few weeks ago. After a tense match in which Team America seemed to have the upper hand throughout, Japan leveled the game with a late equalizer and then went on to win a penalty shootout.

New psychological research suggests that soccer goalkeepers and teams aren't only affected by the high-stakes pressure of a penalty shootout. Without their awareness, goalkeepers also appear to be biased to dive to the right in some situations.

The consequences of this bias could potentially affect games ranging from casual pickup matches to world championships.

The bias primarily seems to affect goalkeepers when their teams are down, according to psychologists at the University of Amsterdam, who published their study in the journal Psychological Science. The psychologists believe the bias likely extends to other sports as well that involve rapid decision-making under pressure.

Marieke Roskes, Daniel Sligte, Shaul Shalvi and Carsten De Dreu said their hypothesis arose from a discussion they had with each other at a bar one Friday evening. The researchers were talking about two recent papers. One showed dogs tend to wag their tails to the right when approaching their masters. The other showed that soccer goalies have a tendency to dive one way or another while facing penalty kicks — they seem to dislike staying still.

Combining the ideas in the papers, and referring to soccer goalkeepers, Shalvi said the psychologists asked themselves, "Could it be that they would also, like the dogs, dive more to the right?"

On the following Monday, they started examining the evidence. They looked at penalty kicks in the men's World Cup soccer championship from 1982 onward and found 204 penalty shootouts. When teams were tied, they found that goalkeepers dived left and right equally. But when their teams were down, the psychologists found goalkeepers were more than twice as likely to dive right as dive left.

Predisposition To The Right

Now, there's a scientific explanation for this — and it doesn't have anything to do with being left-handed or right-handed. Among humans, dogs and some other animals, individuals unconsciously move to the right when they approach something they really want. Lovers tend to lean their heads to the right when they kiss; dogs wag their tails to the right when their masters approach.

The predisposition to go one way rather than another doesn't mean that individuals always have to go that way. But it does mean they have an unconscious tendency to favor one side rather than another in certain situations.

Shalvi and the other psychologists said the tendency likely arose in different species because there was an evolutionary advantage for many members of a given species to favor one direction rather than another — when they were hunting or avoiding predators, for example.

Shalvi thinks soccer goalkeepers tend to dive right when all hopes are pinned on them. That's why they dive right, he said, "especially when their team is behind and their likelihood to be heroes is the greatest."

During the recent U.S.-Japan match, U.S. goalkeeper Hope Solo faced four penalty kicks and dived right all four times. That's an anecdote — and may also reflect a deliberate decision on the part of Solo and her coaches — but her behavior does line up with Shalvi's psychological research.

Laurie George, a former professional soccer player who now coaches goalkeepers at the University of Maryland, College Park, said she would share the results of the study with her charges, but said she would still remind young goalkeepers about the basics: Try to make yourself as "large as possible" during a penalty kick, watch the eyes and positioning of the player taking the penalty kick, and get a good jump.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

MICHELE NORRIS, Host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.

MELISSA BLOCK, Host:

And I'm Melissa Block. If you follow soccer or you watch the U.S. women's team lose in the World Cup final last month, you know how critical penalty kicks can be. Players train to kick them and goalkeepers train endlessly to stop them. But science knows something that coaches and players don't. As NPR's Shankar Vedantam explains, it's a secret weapon that could change the outcome of everything from pickup games to world championships.

LAURIE GEORGE: Stick it. Stick it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Soccer camp is in full swing at the University of Maryland outside Washington, D.C.

GEORGE: Tighten those hands up there, girl. Tighten those hands up.

VEDANTAM: Coach Laurie George is teaching 20 teenagers how to be goalkeepers.

GEORGE: Get your body behind the ball. Don't smack at the ball. I'm not yelling at you. I'm motivating you.

VEDANTAM: OK. So she is yelling at them. That's because she knows what it's like to defend a soccer goal against a penalty kick. The goal is wide, 24 feet wide. The ball, just 12 yards away. When Laurie George used to play in the pros, she used every psychological weapon to narrow the odds.

GEORGE: I am staring her down. I look at the player's eyes. I look at her positioning. I make myself as big as possible.

VEDANTAM: Goalkeepers can't start to dive until the moment the ball is kicked. Then, they have an instant to decide which way to go.

GEORGE: I mean, it is a split second. You're trying to react as fast as possible, but also maybe you're trying to guess and hope that you guess the right way. There you go. Well done.

VEDANTAM: But new psychological research shows that without goalkeepers being aware of it, without coaches being aware of it, something else is at play. In certain situations, goalkeepers start to predictably dive to the right. Now, that sounds like the kind of theory a bunch of soccer fans might dream up in a bar, and actually, that's exactly what happened.

SHAUL SHALVI: We were sitting in a bar actually on the weekend, discussing all kinds of trivial issues, including football, which we all like a lot.

VEDANTAM: That's Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist in Amsterdam. Shalvi and a couple of colleagues were talking about a recent paper. It showed that when dogs eagerly approach their masters...

SHALVI: They have this tendency to wag their tails to the right.

VEDANTAM: Shalvi and his colleagues wondered if soccer goalkeepers might have the same tendency.

SHALVI: Could it be that they would also, like dogs, dive more to the right?

VEDANTAM: Now, this is where science has a leg up on theories fueled by beer. On Monday morning, when they got back to work, Shalvi and his colleagues started examining the evidence.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This to make it one-one from the spot.

VEDANTAM: They looked at penalty kicks in the men's World Cup soccer championship from 1982 onward. They found 204 penalty shootouts where penalty kicks decided the game.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MALE: It was unlucky on (unintelligible) part. He got a hand to the ball...

VEDANTAM: When teams were tied, goalkeepers dived left and right equally. But when their team was down...

SHALVI: Then, goalkeepers dove twice as much to the right than to the left.

VEDANTAM: Now, there's a scientific explanation for this, and it doesn't have anything to do with being left-handed or right-handed. Among humans, dogs and some other types of social animals, individuals unconsciously move to the right when they approach something they really want. Lovers tend to lean their heads to the right when they kiss; dogs wag their tails to the right when their masters approach. Shalvi thinks soccer goalkeepers tend to dive right when all hopes are pinned on them. That's why they dive right...

SHALVI: Especially when their team is behind and their likelihood to be heroes is the greatest.

VEDANTAM: I wondered what a soccer coach would make of the finding. Laurie, are you there?

GEORGE: Yes.

VEDANTAM: I asked Laurie George to watch a replay of the World Cup final between the United States and Japan.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MALE: This looks like it's going all the way to penalties.

VEDANTAM: When I first told her about Shalvi's theory, before the World Cup, she was skeptical. But then, the championship match came down to penalty kicks.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MALE: Penalty shootout works on the basis of five penalties each.

GEORGE: When they went into penalty kicks, my stomach, literally, was churning.

VEDANTAM: Things started going badly for Team America from the start.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MALE: Oh. (Unintelligible). It's all going horribly wrong here.

VEDANTAM: And that's the setup Shalvi was talking about. Your team is down, and everyone looks to you, the goalkeeper, to save the day. The first Japanese penalty kick, U.S. goalkeeper Hope Solo moved right. The ball went left. The next shot, Solo dived right and came up with a save. The third shot, Solo missed after diving again to the right.

GEORGE: You're right, another one to the right. Maybe your theory could be working.

VEDANTAM: The fourth kick, with the championship on the line, Solo dived right again.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MALE: It is Japan's World Cup.

GEORGE: Yeah. Game over.

VEDANTAM: Do you think there's anything to the theory now?

GEORGE: Maybe so.

VEDANTAM: George says she'll tell her students about the study, but she doesn't want them thinking about a psychology paper when they're facing a penalty kick.

GEORGE: I still want my goalkeeper to make herself big, read their eyes, read their body position and get a good jump on the shot.

BLOCK: Shankar Vedantam, my mind is spinning, thinking about all of these possibilities here. You've been talking about the psychology of the goalie, but let's think about it from the kicker's perspective. What does science have to say about what the kicker should do?

VEDANTAM: Well, I think, based on this paper, the lesson is if your team is up, then you should kick the ball towards the goalkeeper's left because the goalkeeper has a tendency to dive right. When your team is down or level, you may want to consider kicking the ball just straight down the middle because goalkeepers are also known to have a tendency to dive left or right and not stay in the middle.

BLOCK: It's a lot to think about in a tiny fraction of a second.

VEDANTAM: Yeah. You could just look at psychology - bring a psychology paper onto the field that they could look at. That's what I would do if I were playing.